# Schrödinger's Cat There were a few minutes during a meeting at work this week in which we all become collectively aware of a cat. Not a cat that had wandered into the room, nor a cat that belongs to any one of us, but a cat belonging to one of the elderly residents of the facility -- no one had, in fact, seen it, or even thought about it, for quite a while. The thing is, its owner has been in the hospital for a couple of weeks now. One of the group had been keeping house late last night, blissfully free of any thought of work or woe, when she was struck with a question, right out of the clear grey sky: where was Dorothy Duffer's cat? So there it is in my notes from the meeting, a marginal bit penned in block caps, which reads: CAT MIGHT BE DEAD. Now that they'd remembered, people were going to go to the apartment, make inquiries, poke about with ginger steps and trembling noses. The great hope was that the woman's brother had stopped by & picked up the cat, although no one had seen him do so. I never asked what they'd found out and I don't plan to, because as long as I don't know, the cat has the rare distinction of being both dead and alive. That is, it has the chance of being either dead or alive, which means that in my own mind I have to consider both possibilities at the same time, therefore making the cat in a very practical sense, dead and alive simultaneously. It's like my very own version of *Schrödinger's Cat*. Schrödinger's Cat, as you may and/or may or may not be aware, is a famous thought experiment named for the particle physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who came up with it in 1935. Schrödinger was, not to say critical, but at least doubtful, as to the then-common understanding of a particular article then making the rounds among quantum physicists. This understanding held that, at extremely small scales, a system may exist not just in one state or another, but *in both states simultaneously*, and that it is only when the system is measured or observed, that it "collapses" into one state or the other. For example, consider an extremely small bit of a radioactive substance, so small that, over the course of an hour only one atom might, or might not, decay. The most popular understanding of quantum mechanics is that after an hour, the atom both has and has not decayed. It doesn't "decide" whether it's decayed until an actual measurement is taken, at which point the system collapses into one state or another. Schrödinger, as I say, was not at all sure about this; and to illustrate his doubts, he proposed we imagine an extremely inhumane box containing a live cat, and a Geiger counter hooked up to these tiny few atoms of radioactive substance. If an atom decays, the Geiger counter releases a spray of hydrocyanic acid, killing the cat; if no atom decays, the cat lives. The 1935 understanding of quantum mechanics applied to this scenario would hold that, after an hour, until you looked inside the box, the cat would be alive and dead at the same time, which is clearly ridiculous. Schrödinger and Einstein shared a good scholarly laugh over it. So now at work I have my very own instance of Schrödinger's cat. As long as no one tells me whether or not they found it gathering dust, or worse, in a closet or whether the brother had in fact descended upon it as a ministering angel, the cat remains deliciously unresolved. It has withered through starvation in the apartment *and* it is roaming the parking lot by the light of the full moon -- as long as no one knows for sure either way, it can literally have the best of both worlds: this one, and the next. It is by far the most interesting thing I've ever heard of happening and not happening at my singularly uninteresting place of employ. I may not be able to keep company with this double cat of mine, but I feel a sort of affinity with him nonetheless. I often feel as though I myself exist in two states simultaneously: the one that remains at this job for another year, then three years, then five, each passing season finding me more comfortable with the mindless tedium and making escape that much more inconvenient, finally winding up an obscure old duffer with a paid-for house -- and the other version that makes the leap sometime in the next six months, despite still not having quite figured out which direction to jump in, and drags his family through hell for the sake of failing at an exciting new career. Both of these future versions of myself exist simultaneously, each second is its own miniature moment of crisis, bringing one or the other of them into clearer focus. At this point I'm doing my best to keep the probabilities in balance; whenever one ends up looking more likely than the other, I divert my efforts in the other direction. We'll see how long I can keep it up. * * * Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. I'm Joel Dueck. If you're a particle physicist and rightfully appalled by the violence I've done to quantum mechanical theory in my thirty-second explanation of Schrödinger's Cat, you can go to our lovely website and leave your comment on this episode. If you're also simultaneously and inexplicably fascinated by the sound of my voice and my libertudinous way with words, you can also subscribe to this podcast for free via iTunes, email or RSS, ensuring you automatically get new addresses as they are beamed from our unlicensed radio station deep within the Superior National Forest. By the way, Dad, in case you're listening, I just thought you'd appreciate that Schrödinger's Cat is in fact a *legitimate* example of a *reductio ad absurdum*. Follow us and get in touch on Facebook (facebook.com/howellcreek) and on Twitter (@HowellCreek). Howell Creek Radio has no sponsors. The text of this podcast is released under the [Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution International license][ccai]. ## Synopsis Radio address for December 21, 2013, about the affinity I feel for a cat at work that is, for the time being, both alive and dead. Very prominent mention is made of "Schrödinger's Cat" -- read all the details [on Wikipedia][scwk], for starters. It seems likely that quantum mechanics is right about small systems existing simultaneously as a superposition of two states correct *even though* in reality the cat would actually be dead or alive long before you opened the box (hint: the Geiger counter is itself an observer). There is also the obvious problem that the cat would make an ungodly racket. [![Artistic Depiction of the impossibility of Schrödinger's Cat][cat-art]][scflk] An artistic interpretation of the impossibility of Schrödinger's Cat. By [Jie Qi][scflk] (CC license). [![Cartoon of Schrödinger's Cat][cat-cartoon]][scpop] Read more about [the many appearances of Schrödinger's Cat in popular culture][scpop] [cat-art]: http://howellcreekradio.com/images/17.jpg [cat-cartoon]: http://howellcreekradio.com/images/18.jpg [scwk]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat [scflk]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jieq/2371783536/ [scpop]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat_in_popular_culture [ccai]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en_US